News Clips

Here's the News.
All the news worth reading. (To me anyway)
Note that this is a news clippings blog. Articles (mainly from Straits Times) are NOT written by me.
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Monday, February 12, 2018

[So the plan is, extract your eggs while you are younger, freeze them, and when you are older, and your career is more established, and you are on firmer financial footing, you thaw the eggs, fertilise them, implant them, and bear them to full term pregnancy and give birth to your own child. This frees women from being chained to their biology and can have babies when they choose.]Brigitte Adams became the poster child for freezing your eggs. But things didn’t quite work out how she imagined.

Story by Ariana Eunjung Cha

JANUARY 27, 2018

MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif.

Brigitte Adams caused a sensation four years ago when she appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek under the headline, “Freeze your eggs, Free your career.” She was single and blond, a Vassar graduate who spoke fluent Italian, and was working in tech marketing for a number of prestigious companies. Her story was one of empowerment, how a new fertility procedure was giving women more choices, as the magazine noted provocatively, “in the quest to have it all.”

Adams remembers feeling a wonderful sense of freedom after she froze her eggs in her late 30s, despite the $19,000 cost. Her plan was to work a few more years, find a great guy to marry and still have a house full of her own children.

[For every article or three about how China's growth is unsustainable, and how an implosion/ correction/ recession/ retribution is imminent, there will be defenders explaining why all those fears and predictions of doom are wrong.Of course, official defenders' (i.e. China's government) credibility are suspect simply because they are not independent. Non-official or opinions from those with no vested interest (at least none overtly detectable), are a little more credible.

Here is one, non-official defender.]

By Jim O’Neill

11 February, 2018

China’s recently released GDP data for 2017 confirm it: the country’s dramatic rise, with the concomitant increase in its global economic relevance, is not slowing down.

To be sure, there has been fresh media chatter about the reliability of Chinese data, owing to reports that some provinces have been overestimating their economic performance in recent years. But for all we know, other provinces may have been doing the opposite.

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

[ThreeTwo stories on China. Which seems to suggests a slowing. But maybe not.The first story is not new. Predictions that China's economic growth is due for a "crash" (if you wanna be dramatic), or a "correction" (if you prefer to be less alarmist) has been circulating. As early as 2009, according to the first article.And here we are, 10 years down the road. And China is still humming along. Sure, maybe the tune is a little less jaunty, and the beat is a little slower, but China is not crashing. The point is pointing out the structural weakness and faults cracking China's economy is all well and good. But if you want to make money, you need your prediction to be more precise. Or it is still just luck.]

Friday, January 19, 2018

SINGAPORE — If fertility rates in Singapore remain at current levels, the ageing population will cause a drag of 1.5 percentage points on per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth every year until 2060.

Delivering the finding in a study on Thursday (Jan 18), researchers from the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) estimated there will be 91 elderly citizens for every 100 working-age Singaporeans by 2080 — up 10-fold from 1980.

This was based on the assumption that total fertility rate stagnates at 1.3, with 20,000 immigrants adding to the population each year, said IPS senior research fellow Christopher Gee in a 20-page paper titled Harnessing Singapore’s longevity dividends: The Generational Economy, Society and Polity.

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

BEIRUT — A series of mysterious attacks against the main Russian military base in Syria, including one conducted by a swarm of armed miniature drones, has exposed Russia’s continued vulnerability in the country despite recent claims of victory by President Vladimir Putin.

The attacks have also spurred a flurry of questions over who may be responsible for what amounts to the biggest military challenge yet to Russia’s role in Syria, just when Moscow is seeking to wind its presence down.

In the most recent and unusual of the attacks, more than a dozen armed drones descended from an unknown location onto Russia’s vast Khmeimim air base in northwestern Latakia province, the headquarters of Russia’s military operations in Syria, and on the nearby Russian naval base at Tartus.

Russia said that it shot down seven of the 13 drones and used electronic countermeasures to safely bring down the other six. It said no serious damage was caused.

Golden Globes host Seth Meyers stood before Oprah Winfrey, who was set to receive the Cecil B. DeMille award Sunday night and was sitting in the very front of the room. As Meyers opened the awards show, he mentioned his 2011 White House correspondents’ dinner gig, the one where he joked about Donald Trump not being qualified for president.

“Some have said that night convinced him to run. So, if that’s true, I just want to say: Oprah, you will never be president! You do not have what it takes. And Hanks! Where’s Hanks? You will never be vice president. You are too mean and unrelatable. Now we just wait and see.”